Mapping

According to a tweet, Pascal Neis has updated his Unmapped Places map. It points to settlements away from large traffic routes. However, tagging errors can also be found in well mapped countries.

Stefano Maffulli suggestsemergency=fire_alarm_box on the tagging mailing list for a “device put on public land used for notifying a fire department of a fire”. The proposal is limited to public alarms on the street as compared with boxes inside buildings, which are mainly to be used by and for alerting people inside.

Toni Erdmann shares about the new quality analysis (QA) tool: PTNA (Public Transport Network Analysis) in the talk-de mailing list (automatic translation) and the forum (automatic translation). This tool will help solve problems related to updating tables related to various train, metro, tram and bus lines by automatically creating these tables and doing a performs target/actual analysis.

Almost 4 years ago the Bermuda Triangle was mapped with four nodes and one way. Since the OpenStreetMap Inspector has a “long segment” layer, someone added nearly 400 nodes to avoid it to be reported as a potential error. The following changeset discussion gives some more arguments for shortening the segments by adding nodes to the straight ways. The discussion was continued on Slack and apparently the arguments against the additional nodes were stronger as the nodes disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle were removed.

The Finding Missing Roads in the Philippines titled blog post from user Gowin explains his workflow and new validation approach for spotting potential missing roads for completing roads in the Philippines.

The address quality assurance tool OSMSuspects from user dooley is now available to all users once again. If you log in with your OSM account, you also get to see the metadata.

Leif Rasmussen suggests adding transport timetable data in OSM in a Tagging-Proposal. As was to be expected, most people don’t agree with adding timetables in their full and intricately complex detail. It’s an enormous amount of data, that changes frequently. It would most likely be constantly out of date and hence difficult to rely on. A simpler proposal involving the interval tag combined with conditional opening_hours could be worthy of consideration though.

Simon Poole disagrees with the current practice of splitting tags like languages=<code>;<code>;<code> into language:<code1>=yes + language:<code2>=yes. He considers that this makes it more difficult for data users and editor template authors.

Community

Opencagedata.com features an interview with Russ Garrett of OpenInfraMap.org. Russ, who met Steve Coast in a pub back in 2005, leads the project OpenInfraMap, which is an OSM-based visualisation of infrastructure, most prominently power networks but also telecommunications, petroleum, and water infrastructure.

Contributor johnarupire from osmpe.org (automatic translation) writes (Spanish version) about organising a course introducing OSM and its social and humanitarian uses in the prevention and management of emergencies. This course will be held in the Social Sciences Faculty, at San Marcos National University in Lima, Peru, and will focus on participation, community and geographical open data.

The Data Working Group member mavl reports in his user blog about the first 1000 messages that have been received from the new reporting function on openstreetmap.org. Nearly 60 percent of the reports were about users, followed by OSM notes. Regardless of the object of concern, the main reason for the reports was spam.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Frederik Ramm, currently OSMF board member and OSMF treasurer, reports the rumour of two unnamed companies that are said to “encourage” their employees to join the OSMF, give them election recommendations and reimburse the membership fee.

Rory McCann explains on the OSMF mailing list how an employer can tell its employees who they should vote for and how this can be confirmed despite “anonymous” publication of votes.

We join Michael Reichert and other people’s calls to become a member of the OSMF. Only a broad member base can ensure that the OSMF board will always act in the interests of mappers. If you want to vote in this year’s election, you should join by November 15. In addition, almost all OSMF Working Groups are looking for help.

The OSMF has been working on modifying the OpenStreetMap API (Rails Port and CGIMap) to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation and requests tenders by 15 November.

Events

Humanitarian OSM

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Erasmus+ Studentsannounced in a tweet, that they had held a week-long course called teaching the teachers. The programme had broad scope with topics including mapping, Overpass, OSM Wiki, communication channels and others, plus Wikimedia-related education. This program has highlighted OSM’s possibilities for humanitarian response and economic development support and pioneering leaders (who are volunteers) on this front.

HOT needs help over the next few weeks with identifying the number of Venezuelan refugees presently on the island of Aruba.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has completed mapping lifeline infrastructure, mainly building footprints, road networks, and waterways in Semarang, the fifth largest city in Indonesia.

switch2OSM

Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, has adopted OpenStreetMap as its official tourist map. User Stereo (Guillaume Rischard) has written a diary post about travelling to Kosovo, meeting the local OSM community, and convincing the Municipality of Pristina to use OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

OpenGeoHub announced the first release of LandGIS, a web mapping system similar to OSM, for land-related environmental data with spatial resolution between 250 m and 1 km. The datasets include relief, geology, land cover, land use, vegetation and land degradation indices, soil properties, soil classes and potential natural vegetation and are reviewed in an open process. The project partially overlaps (or in other words competes) with OSM.

Software

Simon Poole writes about the discontinuation of Google Play for Android 2.3 and 3.x in his user diary and what this means for Vespucci, which still supports these Android versions. He also describes how to compile Vespucci for devices with very low built-in RAM.

Programming

Other “geo” things

Justin O’Beirne writes a post about the publication of the new Apple maps and describes how they are different from the old ones by highlighting interesting changes, such as the staggering amount of vegetation detail. Read more about it on his blog.

3 thoughts on “weeklyOSM 433”

Sorry, my bad.
But we were so late this week with the release that I didn’t take the time to correct it. Next week the date with the Irish flag will appear. Promise!

| Let me know if you need one.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that we are always looking for interested helpers who are willing to write or correct texts, for example.
If you want to help to improve weeklyOSM, please register here with your OSM-Nickname: osmbc.openstreetmap.de – Don’t forget to send an email 😉 Then I will give you full access to our editorial system and I am sure that such errors will not occur in the future. 😉

Editorial Page – About Us – Contact

What is the idea?

weeklyOSM updates the community, on a weekly basis, about what is going on in the OSM Universe. weeklyOSM is intended for everyone, from experienced mappers to new OSM members. It is created by mappers and OSM enthusiasts. Contributors to weeklyOSM in all languages are always welcome. Due to the enormous workload (52 issues per year, no vacations, no holidays) new languages can only be set up if three mappers agree to cooperate.

The idea of weeklyOSM is to collect relevant OSM news from all over the world, process it and translate it into as many languages as possible. This should help to inform the community as comprehensively as possible and overcome language barriers.

weeklyOSM is independent of all organisations and companies. This applies to OSMF, HOT, FOSSGIS … and all other companies not listed here. Nevertheless, we would be happy if our current issue (in whatever language) would appear on the start page of the Wiki on an equal footing with “Use OpenStreetMap”, “Contribute free map data” and “Software Development”. We would also like to point out that the editorial staff are not subject to OSMF supervision.